Study Finds Delinquent Behavior Among Boys Is "Contagious"

According to a new study, if everyone else was committing a crime, you would too, at least if you are a boy. The 20-year study showed what every grandmother could tell you; children from poor families, with inadequate supervision and bad friends were more likely to end up in juvenile court. What was more surprising is that exposure to the juvenile justice system seemed to increase the chance that the boy would engage in criminal activity as a young adult. "For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold," says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay.

Comments

Create a Positive Peer Culture

[WillAdams]

I put myself through college working as a night counselor at a school for boys --- one needs to remove the perceived glamour of the ``gangsta'' lifestyle, demonstrate the consequences of poor decisions and provide the rewards of mature and responsible behaviour.

Most importantly this needs to be done regardless of the child's intellectual level --- at one meeting a fellow counselor argued that one of the students should be released because he wasn't particularly bright and was ``simply going to be a janitor when he grows up anyway'' to which another added, ``one who swipes small pilferables which won't be missed.'' --- my rejoinder was that if we kept him in the program and continued working w/ him until he successfully graduated that while he might be a janitor when he grew up, he'd be an honest one who wouldn't steal and that that was a worthwhile goal, and maybe he could be something else, but that he would never get that chance if he didn't graduate.

He stayed in the program and I actually ran into him a couple of years later --- he was just completing an apprenticeship in the building trades and had been out of trouble since graduation.

William